The placement or arrangement of individual visual elements within an image is often called the composition of the image. An image is said to have good composition when its component visual elements are arranged in a manner that is aesthetically pleasant to the eye. By the same token, an image having individual visual elements arranged in a manner that is unpleasant is considered to have poor composition.
Because the quality of composition tends to be a subjective characteristic, and due to the unique nature of most images, it is difficult to find universal constants that define good composition. However, some observations have been made of what generally constitutes an image with good composition. Particularly, it has been found that most images said to have good composition have a good visual balance in the spatial distribution of the various visual elements making up the image.
Throughout the drawings, identical reference numbers designate similar, but not necessarily identical, elements.